Search results

Clothing patterns play a dominant role in costume design and have become an important link in the perception of costume art. Conventional clothing patterns design relies on experienced designers. Although the quality of clothing patterns is very high on conventional design, the input time and output amount ratio is relative low for conventional design. In order to break through the bottleneck of conventional clothing patterns design, this paper proposes a novel way based on generative adversarial network (GAN) model for automatic clothing patterns generation, which not only reduces the dependence of experienced designer, but also improve the input-output ratio.

In view of the fact that clothing patterns have high requirements for global artistic perception and local texture details, this paper improves the conventional GAN model from two aspects: a multi-scales discriminators strategy is introduced to deal with the local texture details; and the self-attention mechanism is introduced to improve the global artistic perception. Therefore, the improved GAN called multi-scales self-attention improved generative adversarial network (MS-SA-GAN) model, which is used for high resolution clothing patterns generation.

To verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed MS-SA-GAN model, a crawler is designed to acquire standard clothing patterns dataset from Baidu pictures, and a comparative experiment is conducted on our designed clothing patterns dataset. In experiments, we have adjusted different parameters of the proposed MS-SA-GAN model, and compared the global artistic perception and local texture details of the generated clothing patterns.

Experimental results have shown that the clothing patterns generated by the proposed MS-SA-GAN model are superior to the conventional algorithms in some local texture detail indexes. In addition, a group of clothing design professionals is invited to evaluate the global artistic perception through a valence-arousal scale. The scale results have shown that the proposed MS-SA-GAN model achieves a better global art perception.

Numerous studies highlight the importance of knowledge transfer between projects, but the influence factors are still debated. As a contribution to the identified gap, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of organizational context, project characteristics and social relations in the inter-project knowledge transfer within the project-based organizations (PBOs).

This paper collects the data through 268 sample questionnaires from Chinese construction sectors and applies the structure equation modeling to analyze knowledge transfer between projects in PBOs.

The results indicate the organizational context (meeting system, reward system and shared culture) and project characteristics (similarity and urgency) are antecedents affecting social relations (communication, trust and reciprocity) between project teams, and their social relations further influence the effectiveness of inter-project knowledge transfer.

The study highlights the role of organizational context and effect of social relations for inter-project knowledge transfer in PBOs, and provides valuable suggestions for knowledge and project management in PBOs.

This paper seeks to propose that practical wisdom originating within the Chinese classical traditions has been instrumental in China's ascendance to the world stage. Its purpose is to analyze biographical data across 200 Chinese business leaders in order to gauge the relative influence of two competing ideologies – Maoism and Confucianism.

This paper is based on a two‐step design process. First, modern day leadership archetypes characterizing Maoist and Confucian ideology were developed from the literature. Second, these archetypes were applied in the content analysis of biographical data on Chinese business leaders.

There was evidence of both Maoism and Confucianism in the practices of Chinese business leaders. An unintended, third cohort of leaders emerged, representative of the younger end of the biographical distribution, who appear to embrace paradox in their ideological orientation.

There were three practical implications for management and leadership development: the importance of integrating the concept of paradox into management and leadership development curricula; the provision of illustrative alternatives to western world leadership exemplars; and increased emphasis on global leadership as an emergent phenomenon with particular attention to the burgeoning internationalization of Chinese enterprise and its associated ideologies.

The current leadership literature is dominated by western world exemplars. This paper offers an alternative view; one rich with the wisdom and classical traditions of the Chinese culture.

This study seeks to understand how accountant stereotypes have been constructed and reconstructed at the macro-national and the structural level in Chinese society.

This qualitative investigation into China's social construction of accountant stereotypes employs Becker's (1963) labelling theory. Viewing stereotyping as a socially constructed practice, this study draws on a post-positivistic, reflexive epistemology in conducting 28 semi-structured interviews with accountants and related actors.

Chinese accountant stereotypes are constructed and reconstructed according to the rules created and enforced in different cultural-political periods. The accountant stereotypes constructed during the ancient Confucian period (500 BC – 1948) were replaced during 1949 and 2012 when the political focus shifted towards propagating socialism and later promoting economic growth. They also show how Confucian stereotypes of accountants resurfaced in 2013 but were reconstructed by the central government's cultural confidence policy of propagating Confucianism.

Empirically, prior literature has focused on what the accountant stereotype is and how accountants respond to such stereotypes, but it has neglected the ways in which these accountant stereotypes are politically and culturally constructed, diffused and legitimated. This paper fills in the gap by understanding the social practice of accountant stereotyping in a previously unexplored political-cultural context, namely Chinese society. In theoretical terms, by offering the first use of Becker's (1963) labelling theory in the accounting literature, it furthermore enhances our understanding of how accountants' identities and social standing are shaped by social rules.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize the indigenous concept of suzhi at individual and organizational levels, and identify its dimensions for human resource management (HRM) research and practice in China.

Based on a comprehensive review of suzhi literature, Chinese cultural and historical literature, as well as Western mainstream HRM research, a multidimensional suzhi framework is conceptualized.

As an indigenous expression, suzhi can be and has been adopted for Chinese HRM research and practice. As a multidimensional construct, one’s cognitive suzhi is jointly determined by corresponding moral suzhi, wenhua (knowledge-based) suzhi and zhuanye (professional) suzhi. Cognitive suzhi, in turn, determines one’s behavioral suzhi that drives employees to enhance organizational performance, and this relationship is moderated by psychological suzhi.

The proposed framework provides new insight for Chinese indigenous management research, particularly in developing suzhi measurement for different dimensions. It also informs HRM practices in recruiting, selection, performance analysis and employee career development.

The complexity of suzhi dimensions from an organizational HRM perspective is analyzed. The resulting suzhi framework offers new insight for HRM research and practices in China.

Although domestic research on Chinese management is emerging, a suitable domestic theory is still needed to support and explain Chinese management practice. Given that, this paper aims to extract ideas of cultivation from Confucianism and propose a theoretical framework of self-cultivation with a purpose to provide new explanations for domestic (nondomestic as well) management practice.

Drawing from pre-Qin cultivation discourse and management practice, this paper develops a theoretical framework of self-cultivation and discusses its implications.

This paper argues that self-cultivation emphasizes self-consciousness, initiative and selflessness. It also includes self-reflection, self-discipline, self-study and self-improvement, as well as self-dedication, all of which reflect the ideal realm of “self-cultivation.” This “realm” refers to the process of pursuing an ideal personality and high moral standards.

This paper contributes to the literature by identifying various potential applications of self-cultivation theory to domestic research on organizational behavior in China.

This study aims to investigate the quality of disclosure of a cutting-edge reporting tool – integrated reporting (<IR>) – in terms of its effectiveness to report on COVID-19 pandemic information, its ability to provide forward-looking information and risk impact implications, and its quality determinants in challenging times.

Thanks to a content analysis of 247 <IR> for FY20, an integrated reporting disclosure score was developed to assess the disclosure quality provided by the sampled companies. Three research questions were tested through logistic regressions.

Non-financial disclosure activities struggle to provide adequate information in terms of potential future scenarios, risk assessment and forward-looking analyses. However, companies incorporated in “Anglo-Saxon” territories drafted integrated reports of higher quality. More recently, incorporated companies have made a greater effort to measure and report COVID-19 pandemic impacts on environmental, social and governance and business activities, also increasing their risk assessment and mitigation efforts. Concerning the determinants of disclosure quality, leverage, corporate governance structures, country of incorporation and belonging to “high impact” industries all lead to a higher quality of <IR> disclosure.

Examining in detail corporate social responsibility activities and corporate governance integrity is pivotal to orienting strategy towards sustainable trajectories: to do so, corporate reporting and disclosure practices are essential tools. In this context, corporate governance systems that emphasize board diversity are proven, even in disruptive circumstances, to play a crucial role in providing corporate reports of higher quality. High disclosure quality that goes beyond mere financial results is considered to be necessary to remain competitive strategically, socially and environmentally.

The purpose of this paper is to study the dynamic vibrations of the tethered satellite system (TSS).

The energy principle and the variational approach are used to establish the dynamic equations of the TSS. By introducing new generalized coordinates, the equations are transformed into the Hamiltonian system. Then, the symplectic Runge-Kutta (SRK) method is used to solve the canonical equations.

The influence of the tether length on the dynamic behavior of the TSS is very important.

The dynamic responses of the TSS are obtained by using the SRK method.

This study aims to develop a conceptual model to understand how customer knowledge management (CKM) affects fitness club membership renewal through the mediation of relationship quality.

Data were collected outside of fitness clubs using a systematic sampling method. A total of 224 valid responses were collected. Structural equation modelling was used to evaluate the relationship between the constructs of the research model.

The results indicate that both knowledge from customers and knowledge for customers have a positive influence on customer satisfaction and customer trust. Among them, knowledge for customers has a stronger influence on customer satisfaction while knowledge from customers has a greater influence on customer trust. Additionally, three dimensions of relationship quality (customer satisfaction, customer trust and customer commitment) positively influence membership renewal intention with customer commitment exhibiting the greatest influence on it.

This study combines the theories of CKM and relationship quality management to explain why members will renew their service contracts. By using fitness clubs as an example, this research extends the authors' understanding of how knowledge from and for customers can influence customers' attitudes and behavioural intentions towards service companies.

Hydroelectric power is widely used because it is environmental friendly, renewable and green. The cavitation is an inevitable phenomenon during the operation of hydro turbine, which is related to the efficiency and service life of the unit. This paper aims to discriminate the phenomenon of the incipient cavitation, prevent the early destruction and avoid the irreversible damage to hydro turbine.

The paper tries to find out the characteristics of cavitation entirely through a variety of features. The method comprises collection of the signals using a hydrophone, acceleration sensor and acoustic emission sensor; analyzing cavitation signal by using the way of wavelet time-frequency, peak factor and power spectral density; and comparing the different wavelet basis for analyzing signals and find the most suitable one.

The analyzed results show that the wavelet basis of morlet is more suitable for the cavitation signals. The hydrophone can distinguish the different operating conditions and discriminate the difference between the phenomenon of incipient cavitation and the other state of cavitation. The results show that when the hydrophone and acceleration sensors are used, the accuracy rate goes up to 75 per cent, which meets the requirements for the detection for incipient cavitation.

This paper focuses on finding the best sensor to discriminate the operating state of incipient cavitation to prevent early destruction.